


Have you ever seen an angel cry?

by melodious_me



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Idiots in Love, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), Ineffable Idiots (Good Omens), Not between those two sweethearts, Other, Trust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-26
Updated: 2019-12-26
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:48:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21978352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melodious_me/pseuds/melodious_me
Summary: "Have you ever seen an angel cry?"Crowley had wanted to laugh the first time he'd been asked this question. Of course he had. After all, Aziraphale was a very empathic being.He just didn't understand why everybody making such a fuzz of it.
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 27
Kudos: 209





	Have you ever seen an angel cry?

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know how this happened. This hit me on Christmas Eve like a freight train and I just wrote it down. It's way too sad for a Christmas fic and I missed tea with my family because of this rush, so yeah, I'm still trying to get my head around this.
> 
> Careful, this is kinda sad. You have been warned.

"Have you ever seen an angel cry?" Crowley had covered his suppressed snort with another big gulp of wine, which his companion had taken as an invitation to continue.

Of course he had seen an angel cry. Not a lot of times, to be fair, but then again it hadn't been a time when he was in close contact with his principality. And yet, he had seen Aziraphale cry. To be fair, more often than not he had kept a straight, dutiful face through it all. When he had heard the people running for the ark, banging their fists against its wooden belly, begging to be let in as the water rose ever so steadily. Not even when he had seen the trail of drowned people in their wake the first day they'd emerged from the lower decks. But he had cried when one of Noah's grandchildren had fallen ill on the ark. It had been a babe of a few weeks and somehow, it had caught a disease. Afraid of the disease being contagious - which it was, Aziraphale and Crowley knew - they had locked it away. Hours later, Crowley found Aziraphale with the dead child in his arms, sobbing.

"She was just an innocent child," he had tried to explain himself and Crowley had almost burst.

 _Only a child?_ , he had wanted to scream. _Only a child?! The Almighty just drowned thousands of and thousands of people, children among them, babes who had been born a day before the flood, and he cried about this one?! How could he condone_ \- and then it hit him. He didn't condone it. But he wasn't allowed to do so. And maybe he wasn't even aware of it, but in that moment Crowley knew that Aziraphale was suppressing his emotions until it was okay to give them an outlet. This child stood for all the innocents drowned in the Flood. So all Crowley did was sit down next to the weeping angel and kept him company until his sobs had ebbed and he was ready for the world again.

And so it went throughout the ages. He hadn’t shed a tear upon seeing Sodom and Gomorrah after Sandalphon had finished his job, but had cried silently next to a lake, overwhelmed by the beauty this night and the world had to offer. Crowley shuddered to think about the plagues of Egypt. He hadn't cried over the Amalekite's being slaughtered but when his donkey had breathed its last breath, again, there were tears. And it went on, and on, and on.

Crowley didn't know how he felt about all of it. Even he himself, a demon of all things, not in possession of a single grain of empathy, had been close to tears on numerous occasions. Then again, and he was loathe to admit this even to himself, he wasn't a very demonic demon after all. For one, demons didn't love and that was the one thing Crowley had admitted to himself back then. He loved, unconditionally and incurably so. However, he was sure it was everything but healthy what the angel did there with his displaced sorrow and tears.

"Angel tears are said to be holy, and powerful. They have the power to heal and bless and therefore, no angel cries in front of anyone unworthy," Michaelangelo had continued and a burst of fondness had erupted in Crowley's chest. If nothing else, there was at least a grain of truth to it. He felt blessed - well, not blessed, since that stung like a bitch, but certainly something - when Aziraphale allowed him to stay with him while he cried. He felt safe, for some odd reason, because if the angel wasn't afraid to show himself open like that, surely he didn't need to be either. And he felt special, valued, everything he didn't think to deserve anymore because Aziraphale was open with him. As open as someone who lied to himself could be, at any point.

A year after this conversation with Michelangelo, the Arrangement was established. 

It was years later that Crowley found out that angel tears were in fact somewhat holy. He couldn't recall the exact circumstances of things anymore - he couldn't even recall the exact century, not to mention the country - but it was the only time the angel had cried for his sake. Crowley had stirred some turmoil trying to engage women to speak up for themselves and hence had entered a marriage herself. It hadn't been pretty, but it was a necessary evil, so to speak, to endure so Crowley could get to work properly and enrage hundreds and thousands of biased, stupid men. Crowley had picked a husband who had screamed abuse, someone who had wanted a girl far younger and didn't know anymore how he had ended up with Crowley, who had gone under the name Rachel Ashtoreth once again. When Aziraphale had asked him whether Crowley had done it to protect the girl her husband had had an eye on, Crowley had merely hissed and tried to utter something or another about not being nice, but his swollen face had made that a bit difficult.

Crowley had tried to be a more or less obedient wife at first, and for a month it had worked out nicely. She met for tea with the other women and shuddered whenever one of them shared a story about her sister being hit by her husband, claiming that her man would never do such a thing. And at first, she didn't notice it. How he didn't want to keep her close for her company but to keep her locked away from the world, how the jewelry he brought her weren't gifts but chains to tie her down. Soon, her only liberty were the meetings for tea once a week, and the abuse didn't stop there.

Sure, Crowley could have gotten out. But she had committed herself to the mission of securing souls - ever so deserving, male souls - for hell and so she pushed through.

How Aziraphale had found her was a mystery to her. She woke from unconsciousness - something she didn't find so difficult to imitate anymore, not after all the times she had wished to be asleep instead of feeling the fists hailing down on her - because someone was shifting her carefully. When she opened her eyes she found her head resting in Aziraphale's lap, his kind blue eyes staring down at her with awe and sorrow. She didn't remember doing something wrong, but there must have been something, mustn't it? People didn't just beat one another within an inch of their lives just because, right? She should have known better by then. 

"Here, my dear, let me take care of that for you," he had said and cupped her cheek oh so gently, his thumb tracing what Crowley knew had to be a marvelous bruise underneath her eye. She'd quickly sat up and shook her head violently. If he took the bruises away, it would all have been for naught. Her friends needed to see this, especially the ones in a happy marriage who had husbands who'd support them, as few as there were. Tears had welled in Aziraphale's eyes as he asked about the girl and when Crowley couldn't even get the words out to tell him to bugger off, he started to cry. Now Crowley gently cupped his cheeks - and almost flinched back as the tears burnt her hands. But a little more pain didn't matter anymore, not if she could comfort her angel and stop his tears.

"Let me at least take a bit of the pain for now," he had almost begged and Crowley had gently placed his hands on her ribs, where it hurt the most, and they both gasped as the angel shifted the pain a bit.

"'S nothing," Crowley finally managed to murmur. "It'll be worth it, when it's done, you'll see. So many people doomed. This is nothing." That had elicited another series of sobs but fortunately prevented Aziraphale from asking further questions about his mission.

Then there came the time when Crowley, try as he might, couldn't stop his own tears. It had been an awful week and Crowley thought he had found the cherry on top.

"It's over!" Had the angel known how his heart had shattered? Had he heard it, maybe? He must've felt it somehow, Crowley was sure. There was such an ache inside him he was sure the whole world bore witness. Either way, it turned out he had been wrong. That hadn't been the cherry. The cherry was the burning bookshop. The moment it really hit him that he was alone in that sodding universe and the last words to his angel were that he wouldn't even think about him anymore, there was no holding back. Demon tears were ugly, vile things that left welts even on Crowley's skin. It took a lot of focus to miracle the remnants away.

But things rushed forward so fast, Crowley could barely begin to grasp it, but in the night, after the apocalypse that didn't happen, he was reminded of the whole angel tear business again and he could say that Aziraphale looked more than divine with just a single tear running down his cheek, his eyes closed and his face torn between joy, desperation, and hopelessness. That night, for the few hours he was allowed to be close to Aziraphale, he felt heavenly.

Crowley wasn't afraid. Not for himself, that is. He was very much afraid for Aziraphale, and ever so slightly afraid for Aziraphale's rightful corporation, but that was the end of it. If anything, he felt brave and spiteful. Mostly spiteful.

That only intensified when Sandalphon said to Gabriel: "Do you think he'll cry? I sure hope he does." Gabriel didn't look like he shared Sandalphon's enthusiasm to see Aziraphale cry, but he muttered:

"At least that'd speed things up." Crowley grew curious. How could Aziraphale crying contribute to his destruction, other than humiliate him in front of the other angels? Maybe it was simply a thing not done. Maybe it really was the ultimate ridicule for them. Maybe the thought of them bringing one of the more perfect of God's creations to tears got them off. 

He didn’t cry but spat the angels in their sorry faces. But the question about angel's tears remained.

" Angel?," he asked at the end of the day, after their trials, the dinner at the Ritz, after everything that needed to be said was spoken. "What is the thing about angel's tears?" Crowley was sprawled out on the couch in the back of Aziraphale's bookshop, halfway across Aziraphale himself. The pretense that they weren't close was finally gone. He felt Aziraphale shift nervously underneath him.

"I thought you knew," he murmured, almost too quiet for Crowley's ears. Then he sighed. "Angels aren't meant to cry. Or feel sorrow. It's a display of great grief when we do. It is as if God wanted humanity to know that it was She Herself crying whenever we do. And therefore, we... bleed our own divinity, I guess. Our tears contain Her holy essence. Why do you ask, dear?" That would explain the burning sensation it caused. But not why the angels were so keen on reducing his angel to tears. And Crowley said so. Except for the part about the burning, of course.

"Oh. That. Well, as I said, we cry with our divinity. We are utterly defenseless and without Her protection when we cry." Crowley sputtered. That... couldn't be.

"But... You cried in front of me and..."

"You could have stabbed me with a butter knife and I would have ceased to exist, yes. As I said, I thought you knew." Crowley couldn't say anything for a long time and chose to bury his face in the crook of Aziraphale's neck.

Since the ark. Since the ark did his angel trust him with his life, trusted him to protect him and not to harm him. He was overwhelmed.

Softly, carefully, warm fingers ran through his hair, stroked over his back and neither of them said anything, because it was so blindingly obvious.

This was love.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you liked it, kudos and comments are much appreciated, as is every silent, sneaky reader who comes and leaves unnoticed.


End file.
